...how this jibes with official EU policy regarding the death penalty? This would sound like a violation of that policy.
Meanwhile, of course, Britain has still not handed over Rashid Ramda for his part in the 1995 bombings in the Paris metro that killed dozens and injured over 200, because the British High Court is worried about Ramda's "safety."
<quote>
The Algerian conflict was an ideal seedbed for Islamic terrorism. Like Afghanistan, the country was left to its civil war; as in Afghanistan, the result was an ultra-violent perversion of Islam, reinforced by poverty, international isolation and a culture of endemic violence. As with Afghanistan, the Algerian carnage was widely ignored by the West — until it arrived there.
The Algerian Army claimed to have killed 15,000 Islamists, but terror thrived: young zealots from Algeria trained in Afghanistan and alongside Chechen militants in Georgia. The radicals moved from slaughtering Algerian peasants to attacking foreign targets, first within Algeria, then in France, most dramatically with the bombing campaign on the Paris Métro that erupted in 1995. The hardline Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, fractured into smaller groups, notably the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, believed to be linked to al-Qaeda.
France launched a crackdown, and President Bouteflika of Algeria offered an amnesty; some armed militants gave up the fight, but others took it with them, to Afghanistan, to Chechnya and, inevitably, to Britain.
When the French authorities cautioned that Britain was becoming a magnet for a terror diaspora, the response was more a shrug than a shudder. But the arrests in London and Manchester, and the murder of a policeman, have finally woken Britain to the Algerian terror laboratory that has been churning out militants for a decade.
The contrast between the two countries is stark. In France, under direct attack, the inquisitorial judicial system went after the terrorists, but we preferred merely to “monitor” suspected militants. European diplomats grimly referred to “Londonistan”, pointing to our liberal asylum laws and tolerance of extremist propaganda in British mosques. As many as 40,000 Algerians may have arrived here over the past decade, but officials rechecking asylum applications say they have so far been able to trace only a fraction.
French fury at what they see as lunatic leniency on Britain’s part has focused on the case of Rashid Ramda, an Algerian granted asylum in Britain in 1992 and accused by France of masterminding the bombing campaign on the Métro.
For nearly eight years the Home Office has refused to extradite Ramda; only after 9/11 did David Blunkett finally sign the extradition, which was then overturned by the High Court pending an evaluation of whether the suspect’s safety could be assured if he was handed over to France.The French, signatories to the same human rights conventions as Britain, are understandably livid, seeing the Ramda case as symptomatic of a failure to appreciate and act on the Algerian threat. Frustrated by Britain’s policy of “watchful tolerance”, French secret service agents are now said to be conducting their own surveillance of the Algerian community in Britain.
<end quote>
http://www.obv.org.uk/reports/2003/rpt20030118a.htm
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